There's a must read on Dark Reading "Report: Attacks on ISP Nets Intensifying". It refers to a report from Arbor Networks that outlines the increasing threat of denial of service attacks on ISPs.
As I have blogged about before, denial of service attacks are an increasing threat to enterprises large and small. As Dark Reading documents, the Arbor report showed that "While most large ISPs have upgraded their backbones to 10-Gbit/s speeds over the past two years, three respondents said they have experienced sustained attacks from 20- to 22 Gbit/s, and one hosting services provider in the survey reported a 24-Gbit/s DNS-targeted attack. The most powerful sustained attack previously was 17 Gbit/s, which was reported in last year's survey by Arbor."
Further, Dark Reading's article said "Not surprisingly, ISPs say botnets are the number one threat to their networks, and that these malicious networks are growing in size and sophistication. Botnets are used for DOS attacks (71 percent), sending spam (64 percent), as open proxies (34 percent), for storing ID theft information (16 percent), and as part of phishing systems (37 percent), according to respondents."
Most worrisome to me was the ending to the Dark Reading article: " There are a couple of vulnerable hotspots on service provider backbones: More than half said they had no way to detect or mitigate DNS attacks, and nearly 90 percent don't have the ability to protect VOIP."
As enterprises move to VOIP they are incurring a significant risk they probably are unaware of. A successful denial of service attack would not just bring down their internet web site BUT WOULD ALSO CURTAIL ALL PHONE ACTIVITY!
Guy
www.authenticationworld.com
guy.huntington@authenticationworld.com
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